Click images for larger view.

Catalogue #28

Composition 10

Interlocking

John G. Kofler was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 24, 1909. He developed a deep interest in painting, studied art at various schools in New Orleans.

After Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) John came to Washington, D.C. to help in the war effort, starting at the Army Map Services. In 1942 he began work at the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA), where he eventually met and married Jane Philbrick.

John was a founding member of the community of Tauxemont, where he helped prepare the foundation for the Community House as well as a charter member of the Mount Vernon Unitarian Church, and was its first treasurer.

Max Kofler, John's father, had emigrated from the Austrian South Tyrol to New Orleans to work at the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. Max Kofler met and later married Sadie Lyster and lived in the same house in the New Orleans Garden District that John's relatives live in today. Later John and Jane made many visits to John's relatives in the South Tyrol.

They also began to visit the state of Maine every summer. The family inherited woodlands from Jane's father and built a house in 1980. John's last painting was Ode to Negative Space.